Big Donation To Help In The Fight Against HLB
August 20, 2013 
A Polk County, FL, architect-turned-citrus grower’s decision to allow researchers to use 100 acres of land has given the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) a much-needed boost in the battle against deadly citrus greening (also known as HLB).
Located around Polk County, the donation — a combination of older and recent gifts from grower Jim Hughes, who died earlier this month — increases the UF Citrus Research and Education Center’s available field-trial research space by about 50%, said Jackie Burns, the center’s director.
The Lake Alfred center has about 70 acres of citrus, but it’s not nearly enough space to accommodate all of the field experiments researchers want to conduct, she said.
“With this extra 100 acres, it will greatly accelerate what we can do,” Burns said. “Right now, we simply don’t have enough space. The beauty of having this wonderful donation is that it will allow us to do these experiments on a much larger, commercial scale.”
Researchers plan production-system experiments at a couple of the locations, she said, to study citrus irrigation and fertilizer needs. But they also have plans for field trials of citrus rootstock that has shown promising tolerance to the HLB bacterium.
Another of the donated tracts will house a thermotherapy study, in which scientists will treat citrus trees with high temperatures to try to rid them of HLB, Burns said.
HLB has cost Florida’s economy an estimated $4.54 billion in lost revenues and 8,257 jobs since 2006 by reducing orange juice production, UF/IFAS studies have found.
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